Categories
Books

Umberto Eco

Baudolino is one of my favourite books. Flat out. I’ve read Foucault’s Pendulum, it was too smart for me I think. I’m a pretty clever guy and I enjoyed the book but I know a lot of it will have gone over my head. The Name of the Rose is great, but Baudolino is the one for me.

Books aside I love Eco’s essays and interviews, none moreso than this one, and mostly for this exchange:

INTERVIEWER

Have you read The Da Vinci Code?

ECO

Yes, I am guilty of that too.

INTERVIEWER

That novel seems like a bizarre little offshoot of Foucault’s Pendulum.

ECO

The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.

I like this too:

INTERVIEWER

You once said that semiotics is the theory of lying.

ECO

Instead of “lying,” I should have said, “telling the contrary of the truth.” Human beings can tell fairy tales, imagine new worlds, make mistakes—and we can lie. Language accounts for all those possibilities.

Categories
Books Comics Computer Games Film Games Me

The Year in Review

Films. My favourite film I’ve watched this year might be Nausicaa. My favourites of this year’s releases… probably Fury Road and The Force Awakens (I also loved how like Nausicaa Rey’s intro scene was).

TV. Jessica Jones and Daredevil probably the picks of the year. I continue to enjoy Arrow and The Flash. Non-superhero… Umm… I still have Jonathan Strange and Wolf Hall recorded but unwatched. Ooh! Rick and Morty. Loved Rick and Morty and seriously lamenting:

– Lack of region 2 DVD
– The wait for a third series

GoT was disappointing this year, still good TV but little progression and certainly weaker than previous series with the exception of the best zombie sequence we’ve had in years.

Games. I bought too many and played too few. Of my whole collection I’ve now racked up plays for ~20-25 games now but that’s less than half.

My favourite game of the year might be Above and Below, just the right mix of eurogaming and storytelling, and easy enough for my family to pick it up on the first play. I wish I’d played Pandemic Legacy but I lack a regular enough gaming group to play the series. And I wish I’d enjoyed Codenames more, again, I think with the right group this would be a blast but on our family holiday it just didn’t really take.

(Talking of games I’ve only really played one computer game this year but I think most games would struggle to beat Fallout 4 this year)

Decisions. Joining Spa Striders is shaping up to be one of the better ones, I’m getting fitter and while I’m yet to really make friends (repeated introductions by the same people are getting a little embarrassing) I’m hoping that’ll get easier when the evenings get lighter and more pub runs are on the cards.

Worst decision? Not sure. Could’ve saved a bunch of money by not buying a host of games I haven’t played! Equally I could’ve saved even more money by not going on any dates but while nothing’s really panned out on that front yet it’s all been useful. Not sure yet. Anyway, this is supposed to be about favourite things!

Books. Really enjoying The Mistborn series thus far, Old Man’s War was really rather good, The Night Circus was nice but doesn’t quite make the top of the list. Certainly happier with how much I’ve read this year and just bagged a rake of bargains in Amazon’s 12 days of Kindle so hopefully that’ll continue on. Not sure I have a standout comic this year though I’m still catching up on a lot of what I’ve picked up.

That’ll do for now I think. More thoughts may follow between now and New Years.

Categories
Books Maps

Plotted

ebeneezer

Andrew DeGraff’s stunningly detailed artwork takes readers deep into the landscapes from The Odyssey, Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Invisible Man, A Wrinkle in Time, Watership Down, A Christmas Carol, and more.

plotted

For Christmas please.

Categories
Books

Book 3 vs Fallout 4

Every day at 4:00 CST, we’ll tally the donations. And if people have ponied up and demanded I write more of book 3, I’ll give up my gaming time and put in another three hours above and beyond my normal writing time for the day.

What’s more, I’ll stream my writing session on Twitch.

If the will of the people is that I play Fallout 4, I’ll do a live stream of that instead. Since I haven’t gamed in a while, I expect the result will either be the live stream equivalent of riding a unicorn made entirely of orgasms. Or, if my mad skillz have atrophied, it might be an embarrassing train wreck as I’m endlessly killed by rats in the basement of whatever inn we start the adventure in.

Pat Rothfuss has some fans eagerly awaiting the third book in his Kingkiller trilogy. Some lean more heavily towards eager than awaiting. Some are just dicks. He’s written a great post about his life and balancing that with work on Book 3 and given fans the chance to decide (albeit for a limited time) how he spends his time, writing Book 3 or playing Fallout 4, and helping end hunger and poverty in the process.

To throw in my tuppence on reader entitlement, Neil Gaiman summed it up best with:

George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.

But even beyond that if Pat didn’t do panels at conventions I would never have read Declare by Tim Powers, the book that reinvigorated my love of reading, if he didn’t give talks in cafes I would never have re-read my Pratchetts this year, if he didn’t do Acq Inc I wouldn’t now have a collection of D&D manuals that I adore, if I hadn’t heard him talk about world-building I’d wouldn’t have started drawing again, and #Ootsays never fails to make me laugh or smile.

And Pat doesn’t have to do any of that. I’m no more entitled to any of that than I am to Book 3 but I’m so glad he does it. And as long as he enjoys doing those things and I enjoy watching and reading them, I will. And if he decides he doesn’t want to do those things then that’s his call, he doesn’t owe them to me (or anyone). No more than he owes anyone Book 3.

Categories
Books TV

His Dark Materials

BBC One today announces the commission of a new drama series based on Philip Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy of novels, His Dark Materials

*Still thinks of his cats as daemons*

Talking of BBC Drama I’ve been recording The Last Kingdom (based on Bernard Cornwell’s Alfred series). I’m looking forward to that, though I still think the world is crying out for a Winter King adaptation.

Categories
Art Books

Marks of Genius

An exhibition looking at ways in which attitudes towards genius are manifested in a number of remarkable books and manuscripts, and exploring how works of genius found in a university library can be acquired, collected and read.

It opened with a few references to genius but very quickly turned into an exercise in showing off some of the Bodleian’s treasures. To be honest it got a little ridiculous:

A Magna Carta of 1217, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, a Gothenburg Bible, Pliny’s Natural History, the watercolour cover Tolkien painted for The Hobbit, Shelley’s draft of Frankenstein, a First Folio, Audobon’s Birds of America, MS Bodley 764, so much more…

It really was just showing off! Definitely worth a visit if you’re in Oxford.